There ain't no party like my Nana's tea partay...

Holy crap. I just saw the first episode of Flight of the Conchords. Amazing. Musical funny=EXTRA funny. I wish I'd known about their greatness before.Here's some stuff from their shows (This is more for me than anyone else - that way I can watch them here instead of finding them all over the place):

Flight of the Conchords perform Prettiest Girl on Letterma
Uploaded by dtrip01

Flight of The Conchords performing on Conan
Uploaded by dtrip01

spend one more day backed into a corner...

There's something urgent in this music. The guitars are orderly but frantic, like the lining up of students at a fire drill. And the voice is measured, even calculating, but hints that beneath its steady song, everything is back-asswards and crumbling. I like that...you might too.

Aberdeen City - God Is Going To Get Sick Of Me
Aberdeen City - Sixty Lives
Aberdeen City - This Is Our Problem
Aberdeen City - Incredible Story
Aberdeen City - Final Bout
Aberdeen City - Popular Music

the heart-throbbing daisies you picked are sleeping it off on the floor...

I love me some 13ghosts. I was raised on the good ol' honky tonk, the Alan Jacksons and Judds and too many cowboy hats to remember. But nowadays, I turn toward the fuzzed-out, rockier side of country. Alt-country is such a strange term. I wouldn't even necessarily say that 13ghosts qualify as alt-country. But there is that familiar sadness in their songs, the twangy lament. But as long as we continue to classify things, people will always be crawling out of the boxes we've put them in. You should listen to 13ghosts and let them charm you.

13ghosts - The Storm
13ghosts - Wormhead, My Dear
13ghosts - Just Got Dead
13ghosts - I Have brought Fire
13ghosts - Shoulders
13ghosts - In The Morning
13ghosts - Tornado



Go to their website for more tracks.

take this sinking boat and point it home...

I'm an Irish girl at heart. I love Yeats and Joyce - men who lived inside their heads and fought against the world. The Irish arts are characteristically desperate, brooding, subtle, and undeniably beautiful. Dubliners gets me every time. And it follows that one of my favorite bands in the entire history of music is The Frames. You might recognize frontman Glen Hansard from the amazing movie The Commitments or the new musical masterpiece that is Once. If you have money to spare, and this sort of music is your thing, you have to pick up Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova's The Swell Season - I couldn't create a better project in my imagination. The Frames are generous men - they share the howling pain and light-headed lovesickness that most people keep to themselves. They also share their music, courtesy their website and their label, Anti-Records.

The Frames - Sad Songs
The Frames - Falling Slowly
The Frames - Fitzcarraldo (Live)
The Frames - Dream Awake
The Frames - Star Star (Live)
The Frames - Lay Me Down

And here's Glen performing with Marketa outside Sundance...in the snow.

they laughed when i tried to dance with you...

While I was perusing the free tracks on Sub Pop, I found Tiny Vipers, aka Jesy. This is music for walking in the woods, for coffee on Sundays, for time when you have time to let the world melt and blur. It's quiet and intense and just plain lovely. This track is from her Sub Pop artist page:

Tiny Vipers - On This Side

And you can also download two more tracks from her myspace, which is full of enigmatic posts about archers and snakes and beasts. This is one far-out girl.
Tiny Vipers Myspace

you're what happens when two substances collide...

Because I'm starting so late in the mp3 blog deluge, I have to beat a dead horse about some of my favorite artists despite their heavy traffic on other blogs. I have to get these obsessions out of the way before I can even begin to move on. One of the horses I'm so wont to beat is Andrew Bird. This man is a genius. A master of all strings, be it violin or banjo or guitar or mandolin, with a beautiful, unique voice. His songs conjure up images of a million ticking brass clocks, a million quiet hearts singing at once. If you doubt his greatness, I must draw your attention to his Parisian street performances for Blogotheque:

#45.3 - Andrew Bird - Spare-Oh
Uploaded by lablogotheque

#45.2 - Andrew Bird - Weather Systems
Uploaded by lablogotheque

Just seeing him plucking his violin and using every sound he can conjure from it is lovely squared. And to be a master of the whistle in this philistine age is something to applaud. But I digress. From his website, I give you a track from his newest album, Armchair Apocrypha, which you should buy if you have the tiniest bit of sense.
Andrew Bird - Heretics

And a track from his last album, The Mysterious Production of Eggs.
Andrew Bird - A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head To The Left

Here is his session on WNYC:


You should love and obsess about him as much as I do, and forgive me for showing up late to the mp3 blog ball with this one. In a shabbier dress. And broken heels.

drink up baby, look at the stars...

Chris Garneau - Not Nice

Chris Garneau would never be told that he "sounds like" anyone. It's not that he wouldn't stand for it - on the contrary, his vulnerability and quiet ways indicate that he'd rather be in the back of a room than in the front of it. But his voice commands attention. His songs are sad and full of raw nerves and bad memories. By merely opening his mouth, he slows the spinning of the world. You should definitely listen to the above track, courtesy Absolutely Kosher Records, and take a listen to his performance of Elliot Smith's "Between the Bars" in a Parisian bar:

#42.3 - Chris Garneau - Between the bars
Uploaded by lablogotheque

you've gone away, where there isn't a telephone wire...

In my rootings around the free-and-legal music scene, I've found more My Brightest Diamond for those who liked the taste I gave last week. First, Daytrotter offers up an excellent session Shara did for them. You can stream the tracks and download them on the Daytrotter Session page .

From Asthamtic Kitty , in addition to the previously-posted Something of An End, they offer two other tracks from teh remix album Tear It Down.
Something of An End
My Brightest Diamond - Golden Star (Alias Remix)
My Brightest Diamond - Freak Out (Gold Chains Remix)

and some of her amazing Blogotheque videos:

#16.3-My Brightest Diamond-Hymne...
Uploaded by lablogotheque

#16.1 - My Brightest Diamond - Disappear
Uploaded by lablogotheque

and a music video:

My Brightest Diamond: Gone Away
Uploaded by huubkoch

Things will end before they start...

Sufjan Stevens - Holland

I spend all day listening to music. Fortunately I have a job that gives me the opportunity to attach myself to my iPod. When I'm working I pretty much just shuffle through my day, discovering past loves and potential new flames. One of my old lovers came back to me this morning: Sufjan Stevens. He came up to me and whispered in my ear, softly strumming his banjo. We exchanged smiles and songs and quiet shouts. And then, all of a sudden, I was in love with his music again.*
Kudos to Sufjan's label, Asthmatic Kitty , for posting this lovely, whirling track from his Michigan album.

*I have an active imagination. So sue me.

And here's his rooftop performance for Blogotheque:

#50.2 - Sufjan Stevens (MusicNow) - The lakes of Canada
Uploaded by lablogotheque

Convince you to never want to go away...

Rosie Thomas - Two-Dollar Shoes

Listening to Rosie Thomas is like enjoying summer vacation as a kid: it's uncomplicated, easy-going, light, and full of possibility. There was a time in my life, and in every life I suppose, of racing my sister across the lawn, kicking up grass and dirt and sending bugs flying out of our way; of mushing up berries and crabapples and water in buckets and offering them to a grateful but cautious mother; of catching fireflies in our hands and pleading with them to light up the evening. Rosie's music is submerged in that curious, lighthearted era we all can remember, except seen through the eyes of an adult. Perhaps if we can get back there as Rosie Thomas does in her music, we can all tie our dreams to kites and dragonflies and fireflies and forget that we aren't giants anymore - that we aren't children anymore.

let the rain fall down and wash this world away...

Bishop Allen - Rain

It's definitely going to rain today. I guess one's point of view in life can be tied to how we feel when it rains. There are some that see a rainy day as an imprisonment, the weather forcing us to stay inside and pass our empty time. Others, like myself and Bishop Allen, see the rain as a new start, a rough patch that leaves us cleaner and greener, better for having seen the dark skies and wrapping them up in a big ol' hug. And here it's getting muddled and dark outside, but the ice cream truck is coming anyway. He'll tow a little sunshine down our street and remind us of all the light and dark and rain and sun - and Bishop Allen will be right there, with their umbrellas and popsicles.

Opera from an Asthmatic Kitty?!?!!?

For any fans of sweeping, dark, dense music, I bring you My Brightest Diamond aka Shara Worden. Ms. Worden is a former Sufjan Illinoisemaker and former opera student. No wonder her music is so diverse. Full of sparkles and shimmers, Ms. Warden is a true songbird, warbling and wailing and running the gamut from opera to soul and screams. This girl knows how to craft sound into something eerie and complex. If we all could see with her eyes, the world would undoubtedly be a far more mystical, textured, Grimm-style adventure. Courtesy her (and Sufjan's) label, Asthmatic Kitty, a piece of the shimmering starry night:

My Brightest Diamond - Something of an End

the armchair calls to you...

Well, hello there. I have a few tenets, a few strongly held beliefs that should be set out into the world before I can go any further:

-Love is a precious commodity. Don't abuse it.

-Vienna sausages are the most disgusting things that have ever crawled from the stinking bowels of this world.

-Downtime is essential in the thinking woman/man's life. You charge your computer, you charge your phone - give yourself some meditation time. Unless all you have is meditation time...then forget what I just said.

-Ted Hughes is god...in my opinion.

-Likewise for Van Morrison, Andrew Bird, Aretha Franklin, Kay Starr, Wilco, Ryan Adams, Zeppelin, Colin Meloy, Shara Worden, Arvo Part, Beatles, Sam Cooke.

-Music tells us of everything we want, everything we need, everything we don't want to see - music is truth. Except for Celine Dion - that bitch lies.